The updates, stories, struggles and challenges of Aurelia Dittrich, a young girl first diagnosed Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a congenital heart defect, and then Osteopathia Striata with Cranial Sclerosis, and also Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome. This blog will also talk about the amazing support and love and journey of her older sister, Madison.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Telling time

You can tell time with hospital monitors. Sudden beeps, chirping machines, and intermittent cries mark milestones, victories, achievements, and setbacks alike. Nurses come and go with the changing of the guard and every so often doctors appear to mark the noon and midnight of hospital life, rounds. Parents greet the day like so many commoners swept away in tidal events beyond their control, pulling with or pushing against, the rushing daily currents.

So much is beyond your control as a common cardiac parent. Every day is toil; exhausting, unyielding trudging toward whatever end. Aurelia is a warrior amid this struggle and her care team the aristocracy, grand and minor nobles alike, but we parents are commoners. We search for whatever ways we can to better our lot and the lot of our daughter in a world largely beyond our control. Maybe it's through an observation we share with the care team, or some piece of knowledge gleaned from experience as her day to day caretakers, or even questions we ask to keep ourselves and everyone else on their toes.

We scramble around like this out of love, of course, but also to fight off fear and its potential powerlessness. This is a good and worthy struggle, but it can make you so tired. Everything slips behind an omnipresent haze, clouding conversations, thoughts, even feelings. Some days little can clear away that haze except for the passing of time, one nurse, doctor, beep, or cry, at a time.

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Today Aurelia made some progress, baby steps size, but progress nonetheless. Her labs came back mostly clean, so she's off contact separation and whatever she does have brewing in her lungs is so not concerning that folks are going to let her fight it off on her own. Her fever is not sticking - if it shoes up, it goes away again with some tylenol (and even that is not always needed) - and she continues to tolerate her jaw movements reasonably well.

The tough part about that is avoiding any jiggling or jostling of the screws while attaching the screw driver. Her jaw is still mighty sore, so attaching that to her can be the hardest part of the job. We are slowly weening her off the respiratory machine and we hope to extubate her sometime tomorrow. I'm very excited about that as Aurelia will no longer need to be restrained. Watching her flail about because her arms are tied down to the crib is heartbreaking. Still, she is so brave, and so strong, and so determined. When she's awake now it isn't to have those silent screams every time, it's to make eye contact and to furrow her brow and to blink, as if to express her will and effort to overcome this struggle. Or, more likely, she's trying to fart. She's been really gassy lately.

Speaking of which, she's only had two bowel movements in over a week. We're not worried, but man, you ever seen a 17 lb. baby unleash a breast milk diaper? I swear to you that my time in Purgatory is greatly reduced because of what we've seen, smelled, and cleaned. To that end, in an effort to be sure all of Aurelia's insides are working right we did a hypoglycemia test today, hoping to see if her retching at the end of meals is related to a drop in blood sugar. We'll keep you posted. We'll also be doing a hearing test to dot some 'i's" and cross some "t's" with our doctor. I'm inserting a picture below of her jaw apparatus, via x-ray, so you can get a clear understanding of how this all works.

Here you can see a number of things on, around, and in Aurelia. From the bottom up: You can see the wires wrapped around her sternum from her previous open heart. Just above that you will see some of the sensor wires on the outside of her skin, wrapping around her torso. Above that are two separate marks on the x-ray; to the right is the band around her pulmonary artery, restricting the blood flow to her heart. On the left, moving up her throat from that location, is the breathing tube intubated through her mouth. That brings me to her jaw. You can clearly see the mandible device attached to her jaw in two places on each side. Between those two anchor points is the incision that splits her lower jaw. As you follow the metal bracings up behind her ears, you see the two screws that emerge from her skin. As we turn those with a special screw driver, the jaw splits along the seam between the anchors, moving the lower portion further forward and bringing the tongue along with it at the same time. This will help her breathe by enlarging her airway.

And she looks like a bad-ass combination of Skeletor, Megatron, and the Terminator. My daughter is a ass kicking cybernetically enhanced warrior. Bring it on, open heart surgery! I HAVE STEEL JAWS!

As we have been thinking of you guys I have been imagining how tired you must be. Each of these episodes is a long hard slog. The word "exhausting" seems to be insufficient to describe what you must feel. I hope you guys are almost out of this one and you will be soon at home recovering! Miss you all.